Friday, 9 August 2013

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012): Under One Small Star, from Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare
Cavanagh

14 comments:

Her 1996 Nobel citation called attention to the elegance of Szymborska's language, dubbing her "the Mozart of Poetry", and credited her with possessing "the fury of Beethoven".

Wild hyperbole in the case of any other poet, in Szymborska's case hardly more than fair praise, considering the quality of the work.

Her explanation quoted toward the end of this short obit, as to why, over six decades of writing more or less steadily, she had published relatively few of her poems, ought to be inscribed on the forehead of every conscientious MFA instructor.

(Pardon the oxymoron.)

And O by the by, to allay any recurring outbreaks of skepticism brought on by irritable reaching after fact and reason -- Marta and Dorota Are Real!

I agree with Wooden Boy about the wit and humility combined in Szymborska's poetry. What I also love here is the combination of the quiet conversation expressed/contained in the words and the absolute quality of silence in the images, and the way the former starts to fill and informs the latter. Under One Small Star (the BTP post) is very special. Curtis

I've been strongly drawn to this poet in later years, even as I've found much American poetry irrelevant if not in fact also unreadable.

Some bits snipped from an essay on Szymborska's work may be of interest:

__

Szymborska is a poet of philosophical reflection. Like most Polish poets of her generation, she avoids personal effusions and an emotional tone. Absent as a person, she is nevertheless strongly present as a voice -- a voice which is unmistakably her own and impossible to confuse with that of any other poet. It is a voice of a Cartesian consciousness and of a cognitive subject, a voice that narrates and at the same time reflects upon the meaning and implications of its own narrative. Often the very structure of Szymborska's poems reproduces the cognitive process, and the poems become a direct and unrhetorical form of "thinking aloud."

Szymborska's reflection rarely takes the form of categorical statements, and this is especially true of her later poetry. Reluctant to provide definitive answers, the poet prefers a margin of uncertainty. It is the initial premise of Descartes's formula, the "dubito" that describes best her philosophical attitude. But unlike the French philosopher, the Polish poet is unwilling to cross the threshold of uncertainty and step into the bright light of certitude: "certainty is beautiful, / but uncertainty is more beautiful still," she admits. Szymborska's reluctance is not the result of a lack of moral determination, but rather an expression of openness. It is an awareness that truth is complex and ambiguous, that reality is thick and consists of a myriad details, all of which need to be taken into account. Avoiding anything that might smack of dogmaticism or didacticism, Szymborska prefers to conclude her poems with an admission of ignorance or doubt: "I am," she says, "a question answering a question".

This philosophical option explains also her predilection for paradox, a stylistic figure that undermines accepted truths and leaves questions open.

Despite its familiarity and ordinariness, Szymborska's poetry is neither relaxing nor comforting. It is permeated by a consciousness of death, temporariness, and human vulnerability.

Bogdana Carpenter: from Wislawa Szymborska and the Importance of the Unimportant, 1997

Thanks Tom and thank you again or some glimpses of my homeland There is a strong Polish element in the part of Scotland I'm from I believe RAF fliers who stayed after WW2 (There were Italian POW's who stayed also and made a life there Hence the ubiquitous Italian 'Chip Shop' of my youth with ice-cream parlour attached) Anyhow good to be reminded of this poem and have stirred up my personal memories of Polish Clubs and jazz and that to die for rye bread ...... as I sit in my home with the For Sale sign hanging outside wondering whither next

Enjoyed the Coley piece very much and, speaking of pseuds, i expect to be running into some later today because we're out and about, rather than inside our four walls, which has become unusual for us. It's a sheltered existence, but no pseuds. Curtis

See how efficient it still is, how it keeps itself in shape - our century's hatred. How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles. How easily it pounces, tracks us down.

It's not like other feelings. At once both older and younger. It gives birth itself to the reasons that give it life. When it sleeps, it's never eternal rest. And sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it.

One religion or another - whatever gets ready, in position. One fatherland or another - whatever helps it get a running start. Justice also works well at the outset until hate gets its own momentum going. Hatred. Hatred. Its face twisted in grimace of erotic ecstasy.

Oh these other feelings, listless weaklings. Since when does brotherhood draw crowds? Has compassion ever finished first? Does doubt ever really rouse the rabble? Only hatred's got just what it takes.

Gifted, diligent, hard-working. Need we mention all the songs it has composed? All the pages it has added to our history books? All the human carpets it has spread over countless city squares and football fields?

Let's face it: it knows how to make beauty. The splendid fires' glow in midnight skies. Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns. You can't deny the inspiring pathos of ruins and a certain bawdy humor to be found in the sturdy column jutting from their midst.

Hatred is a master of contrast: between explosions and dead quiet, red blood and white snow. Above all it never tires of its leitmotif - the impeccable executioner towering over his soiled victim.

It's always ready for new challenges. If it has to wait a while, it will. They say it's blind. Blind? It's got a sniper's keen sight and gazes unflinchingly at the future as only it can.

Wislawa SzymborskaTranslated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh